Moondust: in search of the men who fell to earth Andrew Smith Bloomsbury, 308pp, £17.99 ISBN 0747563683

''Everyone's gone to the moon," carolled Jonathan King in the 1960s. In fact, as Andrew Smith's book reminds us, a mere 12 men have made the journey to our planet's only natural satellite - and some of them have already checked in at that great space station in the sky. Moondust kicks off with one of them kicking the bucket. Charlie "Tenth Man on the Moon" Duke was being interviewed by Smith in a London hotel when a phone call came through telling him that Pete "Third Man on the Moon" Conrad had had an accident on his motorbike and had hung up his har-ness for the last time. "Now," said Duke, his eyes misting, "there's only nine of us." Astonished by the thought that there would soon be nobody alive who had seen the earth from the moon, Smith vowed to hunt out the rest and get their thoughts down on paper.

And what thoughts they are. They say travel broadens the mind, but space travel seems to narrow it until only one idea can be held in view - the idea of more space travel. Most of the astronauts Smith talks to seem to have learned no more from going to the moon than that going back would be better than not going back. Chief among the reasons for this is the idea that practice makes perfect. "I think we probably should go back to the moon in order to gain more extraterrestrial experience," says Edgar "Sixth Man on the Moon" Mitchell. "Experience and additional knowledge [will make] . . . it more routine to go into space than it is now."

Apollonian apercus aside, most of Smith's subjects trade only in psycho-babble. Asked whether he has any regrets about his life as an astronaut, Dick "Lunar Module Pilot" - but never an actual "Man on the Moon" - Gordon can think of just one: his chosen career took up so much of his time, that he was not around to see his children grow up. Or, as Gordon puts it: "I missed their maturation process." Still, if it's genuine, heat-resistant, chromium-plated interplanetary apple sauce you're after, Buzz "Second Man on the Moon" Aldrin's pearls are what you really need. Emotionally battered after a marriage goes off the rails, Aldrin talks of his fight to retain a "sufficiently healthy status". Later, he admits to being an in-your- face guy, but does concede there is a need to "balance that intensity with an easier association with levels of society that can help network actions mutually between people".

Though his book is littered with typographic howlers, and though his tenses have a habit of time-travelling within a sentence, Smith's English is better than that of his subjects. There is nothing mysterious about this: Smith is a journalist. The men he has been talking to, on the other hand, are pilots and engineers - and as such are more accustomed to equations than emotions. Yet Smith attributes their failure to describe the sensation of moon-walking with any accuracy to its being "either too complex or too primitive". The truth is rather plainer. The men on the moon weren't picked because they were going to be any good at telling men who had never been to the moon what being on the moon was like. They were picked because they were thought stable, rational and practical. And anyway, why should they be able to describe what being a man on the moon was like? How many of us can describe what life on earth is like?

Which question leads to another: was there a point to the space programme? A couple of the astronauts Smith talked to argue that the Apollo series was responsible for many subsidiary technological developments, though the only ones that ever get mentioned are non- stick frying pans and the carbon graphite rackets that have wrecked men's tennis. Smith himself thinks that by showing us our world floating tiny and alone, the space programme helped kick-start environmentalism. If so, then it was $24bn - in today's money - well spent. And yet. The Apollo programme, as the blurb reminds us, was the last optimistic act of the 20th century, and I wonder whether some of that optimism has rubbed off on this otherwise admirably sceptical book. As F Scott Fitzgerald told Americans three and more decades before Apollo was even thought of, "optimism is the content of small men in high places". The rest of us must moon at the state of the world.

Christopher Bray's critical biography of Michael Caine will appear from Faber & Faber this autumn

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